Slide Transitions

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Slide Transitions

According to the PowerPoint Help contents, a slide transition is defined as "a special effect used to introduce a slide during a slide show. For example, you can fade in from black or dissolve from one slide to another. You can choose the transitions you want, and you can vary the speed of each." It is important not to let special effects have a detrimental effect on your presentation. Just because sound and motion are available to you, they should not necessarily be used. More often than not, these features are used inappropriately and become more of a focus than the content of the presentation. Beware of this as you create your presentation. Used sparingly, these effects can have a greater impact on audience attention when they do appear.

To apply a transition, select "Slide Transition" from the "Slide Show" menu shown below:

The following pop-up window will appear.

From the "Effect" section of this window, you will be able to select a transition form the drop-down menu (shown above with "No Transition" selected). Click on the downward arrow to view the various options. When a transition is selected, you will be able to choose the speed of the transition by clicking on the radio button for slow, medium, or fast. On this window, you will also be able to determine how you advance to the next slide. The default is a mouse click (see checked box above in the "Advance" section). You may also choose to automatically have your presentation move onto the next slide after a number of seconds. There is also an option to play a sound when moving between slides. Again, beware of using too many special effects. They can all too easily make your presentation turn tacky and distracting. When you have set your transition preferences, click the "Apply" button to set the preferences for just the slide you have selected or click "Apply to All" to apply this transition to all of the slides in your presentation.

Another way to set slide transitions is to go to the "Slide Sorter" view. To select this view, go to the "View" menu and select "Slide Sorter" as follows:

There are also shortcut buttons for each viewing option. These are located in the lower left corner of the PowerPoint window and look like the following.

In the "Slide Sorter" view, all of the slides are viewed at once. Drop-down menus will appear at the top of the window that will allow you select slide transition effects and text animation effects easily. These menus will also display the chosen special effect for a selected slide. You can select a slide by clicking on it. More than one slide can be selected by holding down the Shift button on your keyboard as you click on additional slides.

For your assignment, you are asked to include various slide transitions in your presentation. Please continue to the next section to learn how to use Text Animation.